Memories may be stored on your DNA

REMEMBER
your first kiss? Experiments in mice suggest that patterns of chemical
“caps” on our DNA may be responsible for preserving such memories.

To
remember a particular event, a specific sequence of neurons must fire
at just the right time. For this to happen, neurons must be connected
in a certain way by chemical junctions called synapses. But how they
last over decades, given that proteins in the brain, including those
that form synapses, are destroyed and replaced constantly, is a mystery.

Now Courtney Miller and David Sweatt
of the University of Alabama in Birmingham say that long-term memories
may be preserved by a process called DNA methylation – the addition of
chemical caps called methyl groups onto our DNA.

Many
genes are already coated with methyl groups. When a cell divides, this
“cellular memory” is passed on and tells the new cell what type it is –
a kidney cell, for example. Miller and Sweatt argue that in neurons,
methyl groups also help to control the exact pattern of protein
expression needed to maintain the synapses that make up memories.

They
started by looking at short-term memories. When caged mice are given a
small electric shock, they normally freeze in fear when returned to the
cage. However, then injecting them with a drug to inhibit methylation
seemed to erase any memory of the shock. The researchers also showed
that in untreated mice, gene methylation changed rapidly in the
hippocampus region of the brain for an hour following the shock. But a
day later, it had returned to normal, suggesting that methylation was
involved in creating short-term memories in the hippocampus (Neuron, DOI: 10.1016/j.neuron.2007.02.022).

To
see whether methylation plays a part in the formation of long-term
memories, Miller and Sweatt repeated the experiment, this time looking
at the uppermost layers of the brain, called the cortex.

They found that a day after the shock, methyl groups were being removed from a gene called calcineurin
and added to another gene. Because the exact pattern of methylation
eventually stabilised and then stayed constant for seven days, when the
experiment ended, the researchers say the methyl changes may be
anchoring the memory of the shock into long-term memory, not just
controlling a process involved in memory formation.

“We
think we’re seeing short-term memories forming in the hippocampus and
slowly turning into long-term memories in the cortex,” says Miller, who
presented the results last week at the Society for Neuroscience meeting in Washington DC.

“The
cool idea here is that the brain could be borrowing a form of cellular
memory from developmental biology to use for what we think of as
memory,” says Marcelo Wood, who researches long-term memory at the
University of California, Irvine.

One of the key models for goal achievement is that of cause and effect. This model says that your goal is an effect to be achieved, and your task is to identify and then create the cause that will produce the desired effect, thereby achieving your goal.

Sounds simple enough, right?

However, the main problem with this model is that nearly everyone seriously misunderstands it. And that misunderstanding comes from not knowing what a “cause” really is.

You might assume that the cause of an effect would be a series of physical and mental actions leading up to that effect. Action-reaction. If your goal is to make dinner, then you might think the cause would be the series of preparation steps.

To an outside observer, that certainly appears to be the case. The scientific method would suggest that this is how things work, based on a purely objective observation.

However, within your own consciousness, you know that the series of action steps is not the real cause. The actions are themselves an effect, aren’t they?

What’s the real cause? The real cause is the decision you made to create that effect in the first place. That’s the moment you said to yourself, “Let it be” or “make it so.” At some point you decided to make dinner. That decision may have been subconscious, but it was still a decision. Without that decision the dinner would never manifest. That decision ultimately caused the whole series of actions and finally the manifestation of your dinner.

Where does that decision arise from? It might arise from your subconscious, or in the case of conscious decisions, it arises from your consciousness. Ultimately your consciousness is the greater power, as it can override subconscious choices once it becomes aware of them.

Missing this very simple distinction has contributed to quite a number of failed goals.

If you want to achieve a goal you’ve set, the most crucial part is to DECIDE to manifest it. It doesn’t matter if you feel it’s outside your control to do so. It doesn’t matter if you can’t yet see how you’ll get from A to B. Most of those resources will come online AFTER you’ve made the decision, not before.

If you don’t understand this simple step, then you will waste a lot of time. Step 1 is to decide. Not to ruminate or to ponder or to ask around and see whether or not you can do it. If you want to start your own business, then decide to make it so. If you want to be married and have a family, then decide to attract a mate. If you want to change careers, then decide to do so.

It blows my mind that people think that something else has to come before the decision. People waste months trying to figure out, “Is this goal possible?” And this makes a lot of sense to do so if you’re at a certain level of consciousness. But all you’re really doing is creating delay, and you’ll simply manifest evidence to suggest that the goal is both possible and not possible. You think doubt in your head, you find doubt in the world.

Time and again I’ve seen evidence that not only people, but the universe itself, can sense a lack of commitment to a goal. Have you ever heard someone tell you about a goal of theirs, and you can just sense how wishy-washy and uncertain they are about it? They say things like, “Well, I’m going to try this and see how it goes. Hopefully it will work out OK.” Is that evidence that a clear decision has been made? Not remotely. Are you going to help this person? Probably not — who wants to waste their time on someone who isn’t committed?

But what happens when you sense total certainty in the other person? Will you help them if they ask for it? You’re far more likely to help a committed person because you can tell they’re eventually going to succeed anyway, and you want to be part of that success. You even feel more energized and motivated yourself to contribute to the success of people who are very clearly committed to a goal that resonates with you and which is genuinely for the greatest good of all.

Don’t you think this process works the same way within your own mind? If your consciousness is divided against itself, do you think it will commit all its internal resources to your goal? Will your subconscious give you all the energy and creativity it possibly could, or will it hold back? Think of your subconscious mind as a multi-tasking computer processor. What percentage of resources will it devote to a task that you’ve told it to execute with the words, “Run this for a little bit and see if it works, but quickly dump it if it seems too difficult”? Now what if you gave that CPU a process labeled, “Run this now”?

The universe itself works on the same principle. Think of it as the superconscious mind. When you’ve made a clear, committed decision, it will open the universal floodgates, bringing you all the resources you need, sometimes in seemingly mysterious or impossible ways.

Whenever you want to set a new goal for yourself, start by setting it. Take the time to become clear about what you want, but then just declare it.

Say to the universe, “Here is the goal. Make it so.”

Do not ask the universe for what you want. Declare it. Don’t ask. This is very similar to prayer, but you are not praying FOR what you want. You are praying WHAT you want. You are simply saying, “Here it is. Make it so.” It is like planting a seed in the ground. You do not say to the ground, “Here is the seed. Please, can you make it grow?” You simply plant the seed, and it will grow as a natural consequence of your planting and tending to it. It is the same with your intentions. Simply plant them. There’s no need to beg.

Intend that your goal manifest in such a manner that is for the greatest good of all. This is very important, as intentions that are created out of fear or a sense of lack will backfire. You may get what you want, but it will yield a bitter aftertaste. Or you may get the exact opposite of what you want. But intentions that are genuinely made for your own good and the greatest good of all will tend to manifest in a positive way.

After I declare my intention, I wait for the resources and synchronicities to arrive. Usually they begin to manifest in 24-48 hours, sometimes sooner. Sometimes these synchronicities appear to be the result of subconscious action. I just happen to notice things that may have been there all along, but now I see them in a new light, and they become resources for me that I never noticed until after I declared my intention. But many times it’s nearly impossible to explain such synchronicities as the result of my own subconscious action, even if I step back and try to look at them purely objectively. Sometimes they come in such unusual avalanches that I can only explain them as the result of superconscious action. On some level the universe itself is aware of my intention and is doing its part to help manifest it. I also find that the more inviting I am of these synchronicities, the more easily they flow. Right now I typically experience about 10 per week on average, and I think that’s because I have many different intentions in the process of manifesting, so there’s a constant flow of resources coming to me.

The mental and physical planning and action steps come later. That’s how I organize the resources that have arrived. Once enough resources have come to me, I can begin to see how they all fit together to achieve the goal. But if the path seems too complicated or difficult and I don’t like what I see, I put out some new intentions to make it the way I want it to be. I declare, “Let it be simpler.” I again wait for the synchronicities to arrive, and a simpler approach becomes clear. Usually for an approach to be simpler, it means I have to get past some personal block within me. I have to grow on some level in order to be able to take advantage of a simpler solution. Or perhaps I have to learn a new skill first. So while it might be simpler, it might also be harder on a personal level. For example, by putting out the intention to do more to help people, I had to develop my communication skills. That makes the goal easier to achieve, but it’s more work up front.

It took me a number of years to be able to trust this approach before I could begin to use it as my default manner of goal achievement. I have to be open to achieving goals in unusual ways sometimes. I get what I intend, but not always what I expect. So when the synchronicities begin dropping me clues, I do not always understand how they’ll be part of the path to the goal. But invariably there’s an intelligence at work, and if I trust it, it will work just fine. Usually it will bring me new information first, so I can raise my own awareness and knowledge to the level required to achieve the goal.

For example, if you declare your goal to become wealthier, within a few days you might see all sorts of synchronicities related to spirituality. They may seem to have nothing to do with wealth whatsoever. So you figure it’s just a coincidence, and the approach isn’t working. But the approach is sound, and it is working. Most likely it’s a signal that the path to wealth first requires you to improve your consciousness. This is especially true if your intention was for the highest good of all. If you become wealthy before your energy and consciousness have reached a certain level, then greater material wealth may only feed your problems — your goal cannot yet manifest for the greatest good of all. But if you first learn to use your energy and consciousness positively, then the greater resources that wealth provides you will be a positive manifestation instead of a negative one.

In truth this is a simple and direct process. But our minds are so cluttered with the flotsam and jetsam of social conditioning that we have a hard time thinking on this level. We get so attached to seeing our goals manifest a certain way because that’s how they manifest in TV shows or in movies. Or maybe that’s how our parents or friends did it. But this attachment to a particular “how” blocks us from allowing our goals to manifest far more easily. If we could loosen up a bit on the “how” and just learn to allow the manifestation to occur in its own perfect way, goal achievement would be far easier.

So often I see people sabotage their own goals because they do not understand the power of intention. Realize that EVERY thought is truly an intention. Every thought. So most people manifest a cluttered mish-mash of conflict in their lives because their thoughts are in conflict. They simultaneously set a goal and then unset it. “I want to start my own business.” “I wonder if it will work.” “I wonder if I’ll succeed.” “Maybe this won’t work.” “Maybe John is right, and this is a mistake.” “No, I’m pretty sure it will work just fine.”

If you are trying to achieve goals on the level of action-reaction, meaning that you’re purely focused on the action steps, while at the higher level of intention-manifestation, you’re putting out conflicting thoughts, then you’re sabotaging yourself. If you go on a diet and exercise like crazy, while all the while thinking, “I’m fat. This is hopeless. This is taking too long,” then your higher level intentions will override your actions, and negative or incongruent results will follow.

If you want to achieve a goal, you must clear out all the “hopefully” and “maybe” and “can’t” nonsense from your consciousness. You cannot allow yourself the luxury of a negative thought, and that is an intention to manifest what you don’t want. This takes practice of course, but it is the essential art of learning to use your consciousness to create what you want. When you are congruent in your thoughts, your goal will manifest with ease. But when you are incongruent in your thoughts, you will manifest conflict and obstacles. As within, so without.

Why is it you’re able to do this? Because you have that power. Not believing in yourself simply means you’re using your own power against yourself. You’re like a god saying, “Let me be powerless,” and you don’t even realize it. If you think/intend weakness, you manifest weakness. If you project your power outside yourself and onto the external world, you lose your power.

You don’t need anyone’s permission to do this. It is a natural human ability. But it takes practice to develop your consciousness to the level where you can apply it and especially to learn to trust it.

What happens if you decide to manifest a really, really big goal, one that seems physically impossible? The process will still work. It’s just that there will be a lot more steps, and you may be led through various synchronicities for years before you’ve reached the point where your ultimate goal can manifest. It might take longer than your human lifetime if the goal is so big. But you will certainly make progress if you use this approach.

So what is your goal? Say it out loud right now, and let it be for the greatest good of all. Then say to the universe, “Make it so.” Wait for the synchronicities and unusual coincidences to arrive. Follow them where they want to lead you, even if it seems strange at first. Allow your goal to manifest.

Makes you mostly bulletproof, and fire, punches and melee attacks don’t hurt you anymore. You can still be hurt by explosions, falling, getting run over, and drowning.

Infinite Ammo

Infinite Oxygen (Lung Capacity) *

Swim underwater and never have to worry about drowning!

Commit Suicide

Adrenaline Mode *

Never Get Hungry *

Hitman level in all weapons

Automatically gives you the hitman level for all weapons.

Police, Stats & Gangs

Never Wanted

Wanted level never increases. Doesn’t erase stars you already have.

6 Star Wanted Level *

Lower Wanted Level

Decreases the wanted level by decrements of 2 each time the the code is used.

Recruit Anyone (9MM) *

Recruit normal pedestrians into your gang. If they don’t normally have a weapon, they’ll carry a 9mm.

Maximum Vehicle Stats

Maximum Respect

Maximum Sex Appeal

Recruit Anyone (Rocket Launcher) *

Recruits get rocket launchers if they don’t already have weapons.

Increase Wanted Level

Increases the wanted level by increments of 2 each time the the code is used.

Really Fat CJ

Fat level for CJ goes to maximum.

Really Skinny CJ

Muscle and fat levels are dropped to zero.

Really Muscled CJ

Muscle level for CJ goes to maximum.

Gangs Control the Streets *

Streets deserted except for gunmen fighting in the streets. No cops or regular citizens. No traffic except in gang territories.

Gang Members Everywhere *

Gangs will appear all over the state, even in areas where you wouldn’t normally expect to find them (Ballas in Las Venturas, for example). Similar to the ‘Gangs Rule the Streets’ cheat, except pedestrians are basically “replaced” by gangsters, so they drive around etc aswell.

Spawning Objects

Hunter

Tanker

Dozer *

Jetpack

Parachute

Katana

Rhino/Tank

Ranger

Caddy

Hotring Racer 1

Hotring Racer 2

Bloodring Banger

Stretch Limo

Romero’s Hearse

Trashmaster

Quad

Hydra

Vortex

Monster Truck

Stunt Plane

Vehicles

All cars have nitros

Cars float away *

Bump into another vehicle and it will rise into the air and float away. It will float in whichever direction you hit it from, and the angle at which it floats depends on the force you hit it at.

Traffic is country vehicles *

All traffic is replaced with vehicles normally found in the countryside.

Traffic is country vehicles (minus hillbilly gear)

This is the same as the other ‘traffic is country vehicles’ cheat, although you don’t recieve the hillbilly gear.

Traffic is crap cars

Invisible Cars

All vehicles invisible except motorbikes (only the wheels are invisible).

Improved Handling
(Hit R3 to jump)

Faster Cars

Aggressive Traffic

Reduced Traffic *

No peds and only an occasional car on the street. Parked cars still spawn. Great for cruising. Still enough cars that you’re not totally stranded if you wreck your ride.

Drive on Water

Destroy all vehicles

Taxis have nitrous *

Cannot be turned off. When code is typed in a second time, the “cheat activated” text is again displayed.

Fast/Rare cars appear regularly *

Black Traffic

Pink Traffic

Traffic Lights Green

Cars Fly *

<!– OR–>

But not like they did in Vice City. The controls are more accurate, and the whole process is just like flying a normal plane.

Boats Fly

Vehicle of Death

Any vehicle the player is using becomes invincible and gains the ability to instantly destroy anything it touches.

Massive Bunny Hops

CJ has the ability to bunny hop on the BMX over massive distances.

Gameplay

Chaos Mode

Pedestrians riot, just like they do in the final mission strand. Houses are on fire, people run down the streets carrying TV’s and so on..

Elvis is alive

All pedestrians are Elvis.

Peds Attack (Guns)

Ninja Theme *

Peds are all Asian dudes with katanas. Traffic is black PCJ-600’s, and BF-400’s, and FCR-900’s. Even cop cars are all black. Get katana.

Aim and shoot at passing pedestrians/vehicles, just like your homies would during drive-by shootings.

Peds Come After You

Pedestrians Riot

Pedestrians Carry Weapons

Move Fast

Jump High

CJ can now jump 10 times as high as before. Falling down will deduct from health.

Mega Punch *

Punches send people flying into the next block. One hit kills. Watch out, peds have it too!

Beach Party

Pedestrians turn into girls wearing swimsuits. Vehicles are also beach style and CJ will be dressed in shorts and sandals.

Weather & Time

Orange Sky *

Just like those early preview screens they released, like the one where Carl has a giant hand. This cheat locks the clock at 21:00.

Speed Up Clock

Slow Down Clock

Sunny

Really Sunny

Cloudy

Cloudy #2

Foggy

Stormy

Sandstorm *

Always Midnight *

Clock stopped at 00:00. Weird sudden weather changes. If you kill yourself, the time stays at 12:00.

* Cheats were not officially released by Rockstar Games. They were discovered by edisoncarter from GTA Forums by wiring the PS2 controller up to the PC’s parallel port and trying numerous combinations at high speed. Needless to say, this is not recommended for people to try at home, since it also requires special software to make this work.

Photoshop tennis is a fun game to play on forums or through e-mail. It can be played with two or more players. Even though it’s called photoshop tennis (or photoshop pong) you can use any kind of image editor. A match starts with a single picture. The next person edits the picture, then someone else edits that picture, and so on. The only rule is that any post must be based on, or otherwise include, the previous picture posted in the thread. The more clever the alteration, the better your chances of winning and the more fun the players (and anyone who’s following along) will have!

Steps

Lay out the rules. Here are some suggestions:

How many times will pictures be edited before the match is over?

How do you decide who wins?

A picture can’t be edited by the same person twice in a row.

What isn’t allowed? (e.g. violence, pornography)

See more challenging variations and limitations in the Tips below.

Look for a starting picture. Since you’re going to be modifying and posting the picture online, look for images that are licensed with Creative Commons (make sure it doesn’t have a no-derivatives clause), GFDL or in the public domain. You can find pictures on websites that focus on freely licensed media[1] or use the Find Free Photos tool in wikiHow.

You can change the color, add effects, add text, or “remix” it with another picture.

Throughout the match, you can find creative ways to re-introduce the same image or pattern, like an object or person. Sometimes you can make another, more obvious edit, and add the repetitive item in subtly so that it’ll only be noticed on closer inspection.

A previous image can be seen in the object he’s holding

If you’re out of ideas, do a context switch. Take the entire previous image and place it in a completely different context, such as a piece of art in a gallery, or on a television screen.

Upload your picture to an image hosting site. Your can use several image hosting sites to upload your picture. You can use sites like Flickr, Photobucket, and Tinypic.

Place your image in the thread. For boards which use BBcode, use the code [img]the link to your picture[/img] to add your picture to the forum.

Add the source where you got the picture from. If you have edited another image into your picture, as a courtesy to the author of the original image, link back to them. In boards that use BBcode, add links by using [url=the link of the pictures source]source[/url].

Video

This video demonstrates a time lapse record of a photoshop tennis game that took place over a week with several different players.

Tips

Invent arbitrary rules to make the game more of a challenge.

restrict all image edits to a particular theme or color

specific software

only Creative Commons images

If possible, find some way to coordinate with other posters, such as IRC or instant messaging.

Sources and Citations

A growing list of awesome fantasy miniatures that I hope to purchase, paint and add to my collection. If anyone happens to have any old figurines that are going to waste, please contact me about them since I could always use more to practice on. Thanks!

Online version of this fun puzzle. Also, a downloadable version of this game is available here at Omnifusion! Check it out using the Box Widget located towards the bottom of this page. (You may need to scroll through some other great downloads to find it.)

Make Firefox ridiculously fast

Firefox has been outperforming IE in every department for years, and version 3 is speedier than ever.

But tweak the right settings and you could make it faster still, more than doubling your speed in some situations, all for about five minutes work and for the cost of precisely nothing at all. Here’s what you need to do.

1. Enable pipelining

Browsers are normally very polite, sending a request to a server then waiting for a response before continuing. Pipelining is a more aggressive technique that lets them send multiple requests before any responses are received, often reducing page download times. To enable it, type about:config in the address bar, double-click network.http.pipelining and network.http.proxy.pipelining so their values are set to true, then double-click network.http.pipelining.maxrequests and set this to 8.

Keep in mind that some servers don’t support pipelining, though, and if you regularly visit a lot of these then the tweak can actually reduce performance. Set network.http.pipelining and network.http.proxy.pipelining to false again if you have any problems.

2. Render quickly

Large, complex web pages can take a while to download. Firefox doesn’t want to keep you waiting, so by default will display what it’s received so far every 0.12 seconds (the “content notify interval”). While this helps the browser feel snappy, frequent redraws increase the total page load time, so a longer content notify interval will improve performance.

Right-click again in the window and select New > Boolean. This time create a value called content.notify.ontimer and set it to True to finish the job.

3. Faster loading

If you haven’t moved your mouse or touched the keyboard for 0.75 seconds (the content switch threshold) then Firefox enters a low frequency interrupt mode, which means its interface becomes less responsive but your page loads more quickly. Reducing the content switch threshold can improve performance, then, and it only takes a moment.

Type about:config and press [Enter], right-click in the window and select New > Integer. Type content.switch.threshold, click OK, enter 250000 (a quarter of a second) and click OK to finish.

4. No interruptions

You can take the last step even further by telling Firefox to ignore user interface events altogether until the current page has been downloaded. This is a little drastic as Firefox could remain unresponsive for quite some time, but try this and see how it works for you.

Type about:config, press [Enter], right-click in the window and select New > Boolean. Type content.interrupt.parsing, click OK, set the value to False and click OK.

5. Block Flash

Intrusive Flash animations are everywhere, popping up over the content you actually want to read and slowing down your browsing. Fortunately there’s a very easy solution. Install the Flashblock extension (flashblock.mozdev.org) and it’ll block all Flash applets from loading, so web pages will display much more quickly. And if you discover some Flash content that isn’t entirely useless, just click its placeholder to download and view the applet as normal.

6. Increase the cache size

As you browse the web so Firefox stores site images and scripts in a local memory cache, where they can be speedily retrieved if you revisit the same page. If you have plenty of RAM (2 GB of more), leave Firefox running all the time and regularly return to pages then you can improve performance by increasing this cache size. Type about:config and press [Enter], then right-click anywhere in the window and select New > Integer. Type browser.cache.memory.capacity, click OK, enter 65536 and click OK, then restart your browser to get the new, larger cache.

7. Enable TraceMonkey

TraceMonkey is a new Firefox feature that converts slow Javascript into super-speedy x86 code, and so lets it run some functions anything up to 20 times faster than the current version. It’s still buggy so isn’t available in the regular Firefox download yet, but if you’re willing to risk the odd crash or two then there’s an easy way to try it out.

Install the latest nightly build (ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/nightly/latest-trunk/), launch it, type about:config in the address bar and press Enter. Type JIT in the filter box, then double-click javascript.options.jit.chrome and javascript.options.jit.content to change their values to true, and that’s it – you’re running the fastest Firefox Javascript engine ever.

8. Compress data

If you’ve a slow internet connection then it may feel like you’ll never get Firefox to perform properly, but that’s not necessarily true. Install toonel.net (toonel.net) and this clever Java applet will re-route your web traffic through its own server, compressing it at the same time, so there’s much less to download. And it can even compress JPEGs by allowing you to reduce their quality. This all helps to cut your data transfer, useful if you’re on a limited 1 GB-per-month account, and can at best double your browsing performance.

Since the show first started, Heroes has been one of our all-time favorites. It intellectually balances sci-fi and fantasy with action, humor and drama very well. The basis of the series is that a small number of people are beginning to develop strange, wonderful and sometimes horrifying physical and/or mental powers. As you can imagine, the ways these individuals use their special abilities varies – for some become Heroes and some become Villains…

To continue further into the storyline of Heroes, a set of online graphic novels have been produced. I haven’t gotten to read many of these yet, but they are great so far and I plan to get to the rest of them as soon as possible.

Throughout much of our lives, instead of following our bliss, we’re busy trying to avoid being seen a certain way. Perhaps we’re designing our lives to make sure we aren’t perceived as selfish, arrogant, weak, incompetent or something else. Whatever way we don’t want others to see us, the compulsion to make sure others don’t think of us like that feels overwhelming. Our anxiety about being viewed the wrong way can be so intense that it’s almost as if we’d be hurt or destroyed if others ever learned the “awful truth” about us.

We don’t want people to hold these beliefs about us because, on some level, we’re convinced that those beliefs are true. We’d have no reason to fear someone calling us incompetent, for instance, if we didn’t have a deep-seated conviction that we actually are. Not only that—we believe, consciously or otherwise, that if people discovered our “dark secret,” no one would want anything to do with us. We’d be left completely alone and helpless.

Given how scary this is, it’s no surprise we put so much effort into making sure no one finds out the “awful truth” about us. Each person’s approach to covering up their dark secret depends on what the secret is. For instance, people who believe deep down that they’re powerless might strive to accumulate possessions and prestige to convince the world they’re actually powerful. People who see themselves as weak might go out of their way to act tough and convince others they’re actually strong. People who think of themselves as insignificant may talk loudly and incessantly to make sure others know that they matter. And so on.

Unfortunately, the strategies we use to prevent others from seeing us in certain ways often achieve the opposite of what they’re supposed to do. Human beings are highly empathic creatures, and we can readily tell when someone is trying to prevent us from seeing something about them. Even if we don’t know exactly what they’re trying to conceal with their behavior, we get a vague sense of unease, as if something isn’t quite right about them.

For instance, when we see someone bullying or being overly critical of others, we can often tell immediately that they’re trying to compensate for their own feelings of weakness. When we see someone talking loudly and nonstop, we can easily see that they’re trying to conceal their feelings of shyness or unimportance. In other words, by trying so hard to make sure others don’t think something about us, we often ensure that they think exactly that, or at least that they feel uncomfortable around us.

Even more unfortunately, often we’ve been using these behaviors to cover up the “awful truth” about ourselves for so long that we’ve forgotten that other approaches to living are possible. The bragging we do to conceal our sense of inadequacy, the overwork we use to hide our feeling of laziness, and so on become unconscious and automatic, and sometimes we aren’t even aware that we’re doing them.

A Process of Self-Knowledge

The good news is that, if we can find the places where we’re trying to conceal a perceived inadequacy in ourselves, we can make great strides toward achieving our goals in life. When we let go of the strategies we’re using to make sure people don’t perceive us a certain way, life becomes easier and more fulfilling.

How do we gain this valuable self-knowledge? In working on myself and with clients, I usually think of it as a three-step process, which I’ll describe below. This type of self-discovery can take a while—you aren’t likely to come up with definitive answers the first time you ponder these questions. Moreover, it’s sometimes difficult to answer these questions on your own, and the outside perspective of another person or a group can often help you arrive at the answers where your own efforts cannot. However, I’ve found that the rewards, if you follow through with this process, can be tremendous.

1. Find Your False Core

We can start by pondering this question: what’s the worst thing someone could find out about me? Or, to put it differently, what do I try to ensure that no one thinks about me? For instance, am I determined to make sure no one thinks I’m irresponsible, unattractive, helpless, or something else? When you come to the answer, you’ll likely have a strong, instinctive feeling that you’ve found the truth, and perhaps a sense that many of your behaviors and hangups “make sense” in a way they didn’t before.

Psychologist Stephen Wolinsky, in his book The Way Of The Human, has a great term for the “darkest secret” each of us believes to be true about ourselves: the “False Core.” The False Core, in his view, is a belief we unconsciously adopt as infants to explain why, in the process of being born, we were physically separated from our mothers. In other words, our young minds assume we must have been detached from our mothers because something is wrong with us, and the False Core is what we believe to be the problem.

Whenever something happens to us that “proves the False Core right”—when someone really does see us as incompetent, selfish, or whatever our False Core is, we relive the suffering we endured in being separated from our mothers. The threat of this pain is the reason we try so hard to conceal the False Core. But ultimately, the False Core is, as its name implies, false—it’s an incorrect conclusion we draw about ourselves when we’re too young to understand how the birth process works.

Of course, you don’t have to accept Wolinsky’s ideas about how the False Core comes about to find the concept useful. You can just think of the False Core as a deep-seated negative belief you hold about yourself and are designing your life to cover up.

See if you can find your own False Core by asking the questions I described above. If it’s hard for you to think of what you’re most afraid of people finding out, think for a second about an embarrassing or painful moment you regularly replay in your mind. And ask yourself: what did people say, or believe, about you in that moment that created so much suffering? Or, what were you most afraid that they’d concluded about you? Answering this question may help reveal your False Core.

For instance, one of the ways I recognized my own False Core was by thinking about a particularly painful argument I’d had with an ex-partner, and tended to find myself mentally reliving. One day, I recognized that, when I replayed the interaction in my mind, I kept having the thought “she wouldn’t have said that to me unless she thought I was powerless to get back at her.” In that moment, I recognized how deeply I feared being seen by others as helpless or powerless. “I’m powerless,” I realized, was my False Core.

2. Find Your False Self

In Wolinsky’s terms, the “False Self” is the face we show the world, or the set of strategies we use, to make sure people don’t see our False Core—i.e., perceive us in ways we don’t want to be seen. For example, someone with a False Core of “I’m helpless” might create a False Self like “I never ask for anything from anyone, and I always take care of everyone else.” This person might do all the chores and pay all the bills in their family, and refuse to allow anyone else to take responsibility for those tasks, no matter how overworked they became.

To discover your own False Self, ask yourself: what behaviors do I use to make sure no one sees my False Core? In other words, what do I do to ensure that people never see the part of me I want to hide? For instance, if your False Core is “I’m bothersome to people,” perhaps your False Self is meek and quiet, and shies away from interacting with people to make sure you don’t “bother” them. Similarly, if your False Core is “I’m too emotional,” maybe your False Self is cold, deadpan or robotic.

In my own case, when I recognized that my False Core is “I’m powerless,” many of the anxieties I’d had in my life began to make sense—and, interestingly, to feel less intense. For a long time, I was extremely driven to acquire money, prestige and credentials in my work. Lurking in the background was a constant fear that people would discover some inadequacy about me if I didn’t work hard enough. My “workaholism,” I realized, was an aspect of the False Self I used to compensate for my feeling of powerlessness.

3. Notice How Your False Self Is Limiting You

Once you have an understanding of your False Core and False Self, you’ll likely start to see some of the ways your False Self has been limiting your fulfillment and achievement in life. Most importantly, when you become conscious of how these behaviors are holding you back, you start to feel a greater sense of choice around how you live—and perhaps even that you don’t need your False Self to get along in the world at all.

For example, when I started having the intuition that I was designing my life to make sure people didn’t see that I was powerless, I came up with a surprisingly long list of behaviors I was using to make sure no one saw my False Core. As I mentioned earlier, overworking was one example, but there were many others. I tended to be overly agreeable, and avoid conflict in, my relationships to make sure my partner never did or said anything that would have me feel powerless. I held back from introducing myself to strangers for the same reasons. And the list went on and on.

Making this list was initially depressing, as it showed me how significantly the fear that others might perceive my False Core affected the decisions I made. However, this list also gave me profound guidance about the changes I wanted to make in my life, and has helped me come to my activities in life from a place of genuine passion and excitement, rather than one of anxiety.

I invite you to try making your own list. Write down the False Core and False Self you’ve discovered within yourself, and then put down all the ways the False Self you’ve adopted has been holding you back in life. A brief example of such a list might look like this:

I must never be seen as:(False Core)

To make sure people don’t see me that way, I:(False Self)

My False Self limits me in these ways:

Obnoxious

Keep really quiet and make sure I never upset anyone

1. It’s hard for me to meet people2. I have trouble asking for a raise at work
3. I have trouble taking leadership positions
4. I feel like others take advantage of my meekness

When you have a clear idea of the behaviors that are limiting you in life, and the fears that motivate those behaviors, you experience not only a sense of freedom to choose different behaviors, but also a sense of peace. With an understanding of the false ideas about yourself that have held you back comes the realization that what you are, in your essence, is far too extraordinary and beautiful to be expressed in any idea or belief.

Christopher R. Edgar is an author and success coach certified in hypnotherapy and NLP. He helps professionals transition to careers aligned with their true callings. He may be reached at http://www.purposepowercoaching.com.

Neutrino Hunters Bonnie Fleming and Mitchell Soderberg inspect a prototype liquid-argon detector called ArgoNeuT that will pave the way for the MicroBooNE facility at Fermilab.

The detection of extra dimensions beyond the familiar four—the three dimensions of space and one of time—would be among the most earth-shattering discoveries in the history of physics. Now scientists at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill., are designing a new experiment that would investigate tantalizing hints that extra dimensions may indeed exist.

Last year researchers involved in Fermilab’s MiniBooNE study, which detects elusive subatomic particles called neutrinos, announced that they had found a surprising anomaly. Neutrinos, which have no charge and very little mass, form out of nuclear reactions and particle decays. They come in three types, called flavors—electron, muon and tau—and oscillate wildly from one flavor to another as they travel along. While observing a beam of muon neutrinos generated by one of Fermilab’s particle accelerators, the MiniBooNE researchers found that an unexpectedly high number of the particles in the low-energy range (below 475 million electron volts) had transformed into electron neutrinos. After a year of analysis, the investigators have failed to come up with a conventional explanation for this so-called low-energy excess. The mystery has focused attention on an intriguing and very unconventional hypothesis: a fourth kind of neutrino may be bouncing in and out of extra dimensions.

String theorists, who seek to unify the laws of gravity with those of quantum mechanics, have long predicted the existence of extra dimensions. Some physicists have proposed that nearly all the particles in our universe may be confined to a four-dimensional “brane” embedded within a 10-dimensional “bulk.” But a putative particle called the sterile neutrino, which interacts with other particles only through gravity, would be able to travel in and out of the brane, taking shortcuts through the extra dimensions. In 2005 Heinrich Päs, now at the University of Dortmund in Germany, Sandip Pakvasa of the University of Hawaii and Thomas J. Weiler of Vanderbilt University predicted that the extradimensional peregrinations of sterile neutrinos would increase the probability of flavor oscillations at low energies—exactly the result found at MiniBooNE two years later.

Energized by the prospect of discovering new laws of physics, the MiniBooNE team soon proposed a follow-up experiment called MicroBooNE that could test the sterile neutrino hypothesis. The new detector, a cryogenic tank filled with 170 tons of liquid argon, would be able to detect low-energy particles with much greater precision than its predecessor could. A particle emerging from a neutrino interaction would ionize the argon atoms in its path, inducing currents in arrays of wires at the perimeter of the tank. Scientists could then pinpoint the trajectory of the particle, allowing them to better distinguish between electron neutrino interactions and other events and thus determine whether there really is an excess of oscillations at low energies.

Estimated to cost about $15 million, the MicroBooNE tank would be located near the MiniBooNE detector at Fermilab so that it could observe the same beam of neutrinos. This past June the lab’s physics advisory committee approved the design phase for the project; if all goes well, the detector could begin operating as soon as 2011.

Researchers hope that MicroBooNE will lead to the development of much larger detectors, containing hundreds of thousands of tons of liquid argon in tanks as big as sports arenas. Such facilities could search for other hypothesized phenomena such as the extremely rare decay of protons. “It’s a fantastic new technology,” says Bonnie Fleming, a physicist at Yale University and spokesperson for MicroBooNE. “And it’s crucial for taking the next step in physics.”

Note: This article was originally printed with the title, “A New Neutrino Hunt”.

The Arrow Paradox

Zeno’s arrow paradox appears to show that motion is impossible.

It works by taking a snapshot of an arrow at a point (either in space or in time) in its flight. At that point, and at every other, the arrow is motionless. If there is no point, spatially or temporally, at which the arrow is moving, though, then the arrow is motionless. Contrary to appearances, an arrow in flight cannot move.

If we had a film of the arrow in flight, and broke it down to its individual frames, we would see that in each frame the arrow is simply hovering in the air. It is only when you put all the frames together that the arrow appears to move. In each frame, i.e. at each point, the arrow is motionless.

This is true irrespective of whether we think in terms of time or space.

Motion occurs through space, not at a single point in space. To move, something must get from one point to another, and so at each point considered individually, the arrow is still.

Similarly, motion takes time, it doesn’t occur instantaneously. At any specific point in time, therefore, the arrow cannot be moving.

If at every point and at every moment in its flight the arrow is still, though, then how is it possible for it to move from the bow to its target? If the arrow is made of wood at every point in its flight, then it must be wooden; it can’t be plastic. If it is sharp at every point in its flight, then it must be sharp, not blunt. Similarly, if the arrow is motionless at every point in its flight, then it must be still, not moving.

Contrary to appearances, then, arrows cannot move towards targets. In fact, similar reasoning applies to any other alleged case of motion, so it seems that movement in general is impossible.

The world’s biggest atom-smasher is a smash hit on the Web: It’s only been one day since the Large Hadron Collider’s startup, but the device has already generated an explosion of cool stuff online, including black humor about black holes.

McCready, who is a system administrator for Queen’s University in Belfast in Northern Ireland, has been taking 360-degree panoramas for years at the European Space Agency and other high-tech locales. It’s all part of his personal campaign to add some extra gee-whiz to the genre.

“It seemed to be more used for the leisure-hotel industry, and I always thought there should be more to it than that,” he told me.

Under the aegis of the World Wide Panorama project, McCready went to Geneva in 2005 and was permitted to take his first set of all-around pictures of the ATLAS experiment. Since then, he has documented all the main experiments with the enthusiastic support of the LHC’s science teams. He just finished up his most recent visit, and the latest set of 10 panoramas should be available on his Web site in four to six weeks.

“It was a massive privilege to visit parts of the experiment that members of the public never get to see,” McCready said.

Here are some more big bangs on the Web (and on TV):

British physics student Tim Head takes a different approach to chronicling the collider project. Here’s his time-lapse video that shows the assembly of the ATLAS detector from the ground up, accompanied by the music of Ravel’s “Bolero.” Five years of work are condensed into five minutes of must-see Web TV.

So what happens to all the terabytes of data that the LHC will generate? This Flash interactive from CERN’s Grid Cafe traces the process, step by step. A decade from now, the Grid may be as big a part of everyday life as the Web is today.

The History Channel brought “The Next Big Bang” to cable television this week, and in case you missed it, the show will be rebroadcast next week. Another documentary about the subatomic race, “The Atom Smashers,” will air in November on PBS.

Speaking of Hawking, reports that the world-famous British scientist bet $100 that the Higgs boson would not be found at the LHC has sparked some sharp words this week from Peter Higgs, the physicist after whom the long-predicted but never-detected particle was named. That’s not surprising: Hawking has been trash-talking the Higgs boson for more than a decade. But it did give The Register an excuse for working the phrase “Boffinry Bitchslap Brouhaha” into its headline. Priceless …

And about those black holes: My colleague over at the Clicked blog, Will Femia, is already linking to tongue-in-cheek Web sites that keep you up to date on the LHC’s black-hole status. Bad Astronomy’s Phil Plait puts it another way. The LHC hasn’t gotten to the point of starting collisions, but despite what the doomsayers say, all the evidence shows that the world won’t be sucked into a collider black hole. We’ll have more about that in Friday’s concluding installment of the “Big Bang Machine” series.

Wednesday’s startup was “just the beginning of the story,” said Eric Prebys, the head of the USLHC accelerator research program at Fermilab in Illinois.

Since then, scientists have been shooting proton beams around the collider’s 17-mile-round (27-mile-round) ring hundreds of times, even though today is an official holiday in Geneva. From now on, testing will continue seven days a week, night and day, Prebys told me.

He said those tests will fine-tune the beams going in opposite directions and more than double their energies from the startup level of 450 billion electron volts to around 1 trillion electron volts – which is about the maximum energy achievable by Fermilab’s Tevatron, the world’s current record-holding atom-smasher.

Within a few weeks, the two beams will be brought into collision. That milestone may come in time for the next big celebration on CERN’s schedule: an Oct. 21 gala, attended by heads of state, that will mark the LHC’s formal inauguration.

They are the toughest animals on the planet – and now scientists have discovered that they can even survive in space.

The tiny creatures, known as tardigrades or water bears, are certainly strange-looking with their eight chubby legs, little claws and probing heads.

Some experts have compared their shape with jelly babies or moles but tardigrades they should not be judged by their ‘cute’ appearance. They are virtually indestructible – they will not die even if they are boiled, frozen, squeezed under pressure or desiccated.

Tardigrades or ‘water bears’ are the toughest creatures on the planet

In fact, they can be completely dried out for years – and then spring back to life as if nothing had happened.

Now researchers have revealed that tardigrades – which usually measure no more than a millimetre in length and live in moss – have withstood the airless extremes of space.

A year ago, 3,000 of them were dried out and fired into space to see if they could handle the cosmic rays, a near vacuum and freezing cold.

Amazingly, after ten days, some of them did. They became the first animals to survive exposure in space without protection.

The experiment, supported by the European Space Agency, was headed by Dr Ingemar Jonsson, of the University of Kristianstad, Sweden.

‘Our principal finding is that the space vacuum, which entails extreme dehydration, and cosmic radiation were not a problem for water bears,’ he said. But admitted that exactly how they survived ‘remains a mystery.’

The water bears were kept in a chamber on board the FOTON-M3 spacecraft as it orbited 270km above the Earth 270km.

A slide was opened to expose them to the vacuum and the cold. Some were also subjected to the Sun’s UV rays which are 1,000 times stronger in space than on Earth and, incredibly, survived for the return trip. They continued to breed successfully.

Dr Jonsson and his colleagues in Stockholm, Stuttgart, and Cologne published the results of the space study in the journal Current Biology.

He said, ‘The ultraviolet radiation in space is harmful to water bears, although a few individuals can survive even that.’

He believes that even if they suffered DNA damage, the little water bears could somehow repair it. The next challenge is to try to understand the creatures’ ‘exceptional tolerance’ to extreme conditions, he said. It could help scientists learn how to treat cancer.

‘All knowledge involving the repair of genetic damage is central to the field of medicine,’ Dr Jonsson said.

‘One problem with radiation therapy in treating cancer today is that healthy cells are also harmed. If we can document and show that there are special molecules involved in DNA repair in multicellular animals like tardigrades, we might be able to further the development of radiation therapy,’ he added.

German scientist Dr Ralph Schill, who also worked on the project, said, ‘I hoped they would make it but I could hardly have expected this result – you can’t simulate some of the space conditions in the lab’.

Water bears exist in nearly all ecosystems of the world. What makes them unique is that they can survive repeated dehydration and can lose nearly all the water they have in their bodies.

When dehydrated, they enter into a dormant state in which the body contracts and metabolism ceases. In this death-like dormant state, water bears manage to maintain the structures in their cells until water is available to ‘reactivate’ them.

In 1998, Japanese scientists subjected the creatures to pressures up to 6,000 greater than our atmosphere. They lived. In tests, they have also survived X-rays and being frozen to just above absolute zero – that’s minus 273.15C, the coldest temperature possible.

‘No animal has survived open space before,’ says developmental biologist Bob Goldstein of the University of North Carolina.

‘The finding that animals survived rehydration after days in open space – and then produced viable embryos as well – is really remarkable.’

FotoFlexer – I’ve found quite a few of these online photo editing tools lately, but this is the best by far in my opinion. It not only does what all the other sites (such as Splashup) do, but also offers many more features and goodies like using Layers and adjusting Levels. Picnik is also a decent editor, which allows you to save to and work directly from your Picasa or Flickr account.

Pixlr – Just found this one and haven’t tried it yet, but wanted to post it right away because of how quick it loaded compared to the others I’ve tried. Many of them still use hefty system resources, so this might be a good choice for those who have slower systems.

Jumpcut lets you upload video, photos, and audio, or import from Flickr or Facebook, and edit using a Flash interface. Add titles, effects, transitions, music, and split and crop video tracks. Then publish your video and let others remix it. Jumpcut also has some social networking features (like groups). Jumpcut is probably the best of the online video editors, though I really wish there was a way to export videos off the site.Of the bunch, Jumpcut’s editor most resembles the feel of offline editors, like iMovie.

Eyespot is a full featured editor like Jumpcut. It lets you upload video, photos, and audio and then add transitions, effects, titles, and music. The editor isn’t as attractive and easy to use, in my opinion, as Jumpcut’s, but Eyespot offers a good deal of free media sets from partners like The Colbert Report, Public Enemy, and Dreamworks Pictures.

Movie Masher lets web site owners offer editing and remixing capabilities to their visitors via a sophisticated flash widget, which can be customized to match the look of your web site. The editing tools allow you to sequence and trim clips, add effects, transitions, titles, and music, using a familiar timeline editor.

Cuts lets you import video from MySpace, YouTube, and Google video (or anywhere you can get the direct .FLV URL) and then make your own “cut” by removing scenes, looping scenes, and adding captions and sound effects.

(Almost) Video Editing Tools

Mojiti isn’t a video editing tool in the way that the YouTube Remixer, Jumpcut, Eyespot, Movie Masher, or even Cuts are, but it still probably warrants a mention in this round up. Instead, Mojiti lets you annotate videos you import from just about any video site out there. You can use it to add properly timed titles, captions, or translations to videos.

You could use Mojiti to put lyrics on a music video, for example.

Vidavee Graffiti lets you add effects to YouTube videos (like cartoon speech bubbles, titles, and frames). I found the interface kind of clumsy and hard to use, but maybe you’ll have better luck.

muveeMix is a way to arrange your videos and photos to music, add titles and credits and export them to your blog or social network profile. It doesn’t offer nearly as much control as, say, Jumpcut, but isn’t as complicated either.